week 2

September 5, and 7

"Don't pay attention to the things that don't astound you" Wallace Stevens

The creator of the text doesn't necessarily mean anything by them. It is very easy to see something, that isn't there.

The Goths:

• old Germanic tribes
• sacked Rome
• Barbarians: uncouth, uncivilized
• middle ages
• medieval
• not classic Greek or Roman
• 1611 first recorded~ the same year as the King James Bible
• civilized word~vs~Barbarians
• desolate
• mysterious
• crude
• architectural style: all about vertical and height
• fiction the emphasizes darkness: Poe, The Monk, Frankenstein
• emphasizes the grotesque: gory, ugly, disgusting

EXAMPLES:

• Edgar Allen Poe
• Flannery O'Connor
• Nicholas Cage's film "Raising Arizona"

DAISY MILLER:

• 'trickster brother'
• flirting: "dancing around the boundaries of comfort"
• uncouth
• a flower, like in Persephone and Hades
• Italian men:
• suave
• cook/wine
• hairy
• smooth talking
• handsome
• egotistical

aesthetic: a pattern of imagry ex) Poe said that the only thing to write about was the death of a beautiful woman

14 richest people in the world:

• Santa Claus
• Richie Rich
• Daddy Worbucks
• Scrooge McDuck
• Thurston Howard III
• Willy Wonka
• Bruce Wayne
• Lex Luther
• J.R. Ewing
• Charles Montgomery Burns
• Charles Foster Kane
• Cruella Deville
• Gordon Gecko
• Gatsby

Flirtation:

• 'carried away'
• denies the ancient phenomenon of marriage and abduction
• marriage as abduction: rituals during ceremony, advantages and disadvantages, rituals after the ceremony: being carried over the threshold
• 'dancing around the boundaries of desire'

'there are some traditions that logicians hate and poets love" ~Lolita